Making a living to finding a livelihood
AvinashPaliwal
Posted online: Friday , Apr 02, 2010 at 2354 hrs
Gaya : Tending her half-acre of leased farmland cursed by drought, and
bearing her Dalit identity, Baijanti Devi from Sekhwara village in
Gaya learnt long ago to live with poverty and social repression. Two
years ago, new doors opened for her in the form of the Bihar Rural
Livelihood Project (BRLP), locally and popularly known as Jeevika.
Since 2007, in 4,000 villages and covering over 5.9 lakh families —
comprising the poorest farmers, most of them Dalits — the project has
been working to build a self-sustaining socio-economic system.
Initiated by the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society with
financial assistance from the World Bank (Rs 264.6 crore), the Bihar
government (Rs 29.4 crore), community contribution (Rs 12.6 crore),
Jeevika was launched in 2007 in the districts of Nalanda, Gaya,
Khagaria, Muzaffarpur, Purnia, Madhubani, Madhepura and Supaul.
In the less than three years hence, the project that aims to mobilise
farmers into Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and to empower them to retrieve
assets, credit and social services, such as food and health security,
has come a long way — from lowering social barriers to raising
productivity, and from introducing farmers to savings to opening doors
to credit.
Jeevika aims for a three-tier model whereby 10-15 members, mostly
women, form an SHG at the community level, represented by a Community
Resource Person (CRP). About 20 such SHGs (17,044 SHGs have been
formed) collectively form a cluster called Village Organisation (VO).
These clusters are provided Community Investment Fund (CIF), a form of
grant under the BRLP on a performance-based system, that allows
Jeevika members to repay their previous debts, or to use the money to
start self-employment enterprises such as grocery stores.
"I couldn't carry on with agriculture due to water shortage. So I sold
my land and opened a general store with the help of money raised by
the community," says Baijanti Devi.
SHG members are encouraged to spend frugally and to create savings,
which can be accumulated and provided as loans to other SHGs. This
process is duplicated at higher levels. A group of 300 VOs forms a
Block Level Federation (BLF). Since the project was launched, Jeevika
villages have built up cumulative savings of Rs 11.02 crore and
inter-loans worth Rs 22.32 crore. In a better position to deal with
mainstream financial institutions and markets, SHGs have also
succeeded in attaining credit worth Rs 8.5 crore from commercial
banks, like the Bank of India.
"A total of 485 saving accounts and 103 loan accounts in the name of
SHGs have been opened at our branch, Rs 10.9 crore has been deposited
to date. The repayment rate of SHGs under Jeevika stands at 95-98 per
cent," says Sunil Narayan, bank manager of Bank of India's Gaya
branch.
Baijanti Devi calculates her gains in ways more than monetary. "If you
come to look at it, there is no individual gain in the sense of my
personal earnings shooting up tremendously. However, there are social
gains. If there is a problem at one of our sisters' home, the money
raised from our savings is used to help her. Earlier, we had to go to
the moneylender, which used to mean a lot of interest," she says.
The project has seen a crumbling of caste and sex barriers. Kunti
Devi, a member of Baijanti's SHG, said, "I am from the Harijan
locality. My caste profile, however, has never been an impediment in
dealing with Jeevika members of higher castes."
Another gain has been in dealing with the middlemen's network in the
PDS. "The PDS dealers used to quote higher prices for all basic
commodities. With the help of Jeevika, we took over the PDS unit of
Sekhwara in January 2009," says Baijanti Devi.
The biggest thumbs-up for the project, ironically, has come from the
Naxals. In Dobhi village, as Jeevika members talk to journalists about
their efforts to run an open school for children of the Musahar (rat
eaters) community, Maoist activists sit in a corner of the compound,
listening in. "They asked for cuts from the community fund at the
beginning, but they have now stopped," says Vinay Vutukuru, a BRLP
Consultant from the World Bank.
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